Technology

Agentic coding models and harnesses have become so effective that a large share of new software is now written by agents. For a good reason, it’s faster, code is at times higher quality than if human written, and there are seemingly no downsides. We thought.

But the majority of new Software feels average, in a sense that it feels a like AI slop, instead of software that was created with craft and care. For all that follows here, it’s important to understand, that AI coding produces impeccable results, if done right. But it all comes down to the process. Years ago we used to start at an idea, sketch it out by hand or on a whiteboard, then refine the user experience and exact optics in Figma, then start development. We used to style every button to perfection, manually set border radii to be concentric and look correctly. Things took time and while something taking longer doesn’t mean that it is better, it does usually mean that more thought has had to be put into.

Today, many teams jump directly from idea to their coding agent (Claude Code, Codex). This quickly gets them an MVP, but not something that excites users. There’s this well known saying that getting the last 20% right takes 80% of the work, and here I would say that getting the last 20% right takes 95% of the work. And it’s these 20% that make the difference between AI slop, and a thought out solution.

I wrote about unifying app experiences on mobile a few years ago (before GenUI even was a thing), and I called it Othara. Back then, I thought of it as “forcing developers to use the unified layouts of the OS,” just like I can quickly set up a SwiftUI application that will absolutely feel like an iOS app. But with the rise of AI, it’s actually possible to have the AI generate the user interface on the fly based on templates, better than ever. If every app is the same, built using a set of components and filled with content, then AI could learn how to do things easier and better than it ever could with current systems like Apple’s App Intents.

Why is there a need for apps to look different? Why does WhatsApp have to look different from Messages, or Spotify from Apple Music?

Phones are stagnating. It didn’t feel exciting at all moving from an iPhone SE 2nd gen to an iPhone 16. Imagine how it would’ve felt going from, for example, an iPhone 12 to the 16. OS updates get me excited, but this wasn’t it. I hate every piece of iOS that I use, nothing is working. I used to think this was because I was using an older phone, but no, it’s just the system that is so incredibly bad. How can it be that Apple’s UI is full of little issues, animations missing or gradients being cut off? Apple used to care. That’s what made them unique. How come no QA person cares? Why do I have a list of 10 UI bugs just in the onboarding when you get your iPhone?

We should start applying the KISS (keep it short and simple) principle to websites. A website should only be as complex as it needs to be to complete its mission. And for most cases, simple websites are generally better. That’s the short version.

They load faster. You find what you came for. You read. You click. You buy. As much as page builders try to sell you on unlimited design flexibility, having a more complex design just for the sake of it doesn’t solve anything.

Sometimes you want more on a site than a simple text and some images. You as a user want to feel something. Apple’s product pages do that beautifully. The animations. The scroll effects. It storytelling at its core and a simple text document just wouldn’t cut it, and I see that perspective.

Artificial intelligence becomes the primary interface through which humans access knowledge and it’s time to rethink how we store information in the first place.

Currently, writing is our most reliable method of recording knowledge. But right now information goes from

The result? The article itself is never touched. And this needs to be acknowledged and addressed by a frontend-less web.